Category Archives: Site

Early in March this site was hit with a WordPress hack that was present for about 10 days until I discovered and fixed it. After the fix I was frequently checking Google Webmaster Tools to make sure search results returned. After about one week, my traffic (from Google at least) had pretty much recovered to the pre-hack levels:

Google search traffic recovering after WordPress hack removed

And here is the corresponding timeline from Google Analytics, showing traffic slowly returning to normal:

Last night I had the unpleasant discovery that this site’s WordPress had been “hacked”, with every post redirecting to an uploaded “this site has been hacked” variety of HTML file. I looked back and realized it happened on March 1st and mad at myself for not noticing sooner.

Fortunately it was pretty easy to clean up by zapping the database and restoring from a good backup (thankfully I have daily backups running).

The harder part is going to be recovering in Google’s view. Search queries as shown in Google Webmaster Tools dropped like crazy right away:

Search queries chart from Google Webmaster Tools

And here’s the corresponding crawl errors view:

Crawl Errors Chart from Google Webmaster Tools

Hopefully after a little time the Google crawler will see all those pages returned, but I’m guessing whatever page rank I had will be very slow to recover (if it ever does). In the meantime I’ve improved my WordPress security a bit more, updated to the latest of everything, and removed a few unused plugins. Next will be to set something up to notify me more quickly if this happens again.

I successfully migrated this website from MovableType 4.35 to WordPress 3.8.1. These are my notes from the migration in case they are helpful for anyone else. The good news is this is pretty straightforward, and there are plenty of notes out there (just search the internet for “WordPress MovableType import”). The tricky parts are the custom or special areas of your MovableType installation, and mine was no exception.

First, why switch to WordPress? I wanted something more current with a stronger platform of plugins and themes. I’ve been happy with MovableType and stuck through it over many versions and changes. It just started to look and feel a bit dated and it was time for something new. WordPress isn’t exactly “new” (having just passed its 10-year anniversary), but it continues to evolve and improve. I’ve also used it for a couple of sports team websites which turned out well.

As part of any migration , you need to identify the aspects of your site which are customized, unique, or which will potentially cause problems. In my case I had the following to deal with:

There are a lot of “movie times” apps out there, but I’m sticking with Moviefone for my favorite feature: the Playing Now Near Me button. It really captures the idea around mobile context — rather than messing around with dates/times and zip codes, just show me what my closest options are. This would also be great for travelers who aren’t familiar with the area.

This could also be useful if you’re near the end of your movie, and want to sneak into another in the same theater!

The Moviefone mobile app killer feature: Playing Now Near Me(click to view full-size)